Black Box Report

OK. At first, it was an interesting idea, novel even - Bloomberg for President! Then it became sort of a running joke - his mouth says "no," but his eyes say "yes!" Now....it's just getting annoying:

A source familiar with the Bloomberg for president movement...

I'm sorry..."movement?" The only people moved by this are the press who keep writing about it.

A source familiar with the Bloomberg for president movement says the bipartisan Unity08 effort is poised to shut down its Web site, reconstitute as a Draft Bloomberg site and launch its own 50-state signature-gathering operation on behalf of the supposedly reluctant would-be independent presidential candidate.

Still claiming he's not running for president, NY mayor Mike Bloomberg is hitching up with the serious people! of the Unity '08 crowd. After months of playing footsie with each other, they had their first date in Oklahoma this week. And what issues facing America - apparently unaddressed by any current presidential candidates - do these wisened elders believe they can right with a magic wave of their bipartisan wand?

I won’t bother with the whole list, but the highlights include:

* The United States is now unpopular around the world and our credibility is low;
* We’re not leading on counter-terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and climate change;
* The deficit is out of control and the middle-class is struggling;
* Our military is “stretched thin”;
* We lack a coherent energy policy;
* Our schools aren’t good enough;
* Nearly 50 million Americans are without health insurance;
* We’ve neglected infrastructure needs.

I think I’m noticing a pattern here.
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All of these problems were created (or exacerbated) by Republican incompetence and/or neglect, and all of them have been met with Democratic policy proposals that have faced GOP obstructionism.

It gets to why the Bloomberg initiative is simply inane. Dems and Bloomberg see the same problems. Dems believe the way to address those problems is to implement a progressive policy agenda, while Bloomberg believes we need more “congeniality.”
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If Bloomberg and his friends want to change this, they don’t need a platitudinous campaign from Bloomberg; they need to vote for candidates who have realistic and effective solutions to the issues they’re worried about. These candidates even have a name: they’re called “Democrats.”

But...congeniality! Bipartisanship! Healthcare for the uninsured, a struggling middle class, climate change - bipartisan solutions for all! Of course, it's not clear how this Solomnic wisdom os going to work itself out: cover only half of those without insurance? Rescind Bush's tax cuts for only half of the richest 1%? The problem is that bipartisanship is not a solution in itself:

To really tackle climate change, for example, what you need is not "a truly bipartisan cabinet" but rather elected officials who put the national interest over the interests of oil and gas companies...On all of these issues, the problem isn't that people disagree about how to accomplish these things. The problem is that many politicians don't want to do this stuff.

Indeed, it's unclear how much Bloomberg and Unity '08 want to do this stuff. While they call for the current crop of candidates to "get serious" and "offer specifics," they're suspiciously light on any solutions themselves:

You can spend an entire week around the clock and not read all of the white papers that the three top Democratic candidates have issued. You can spend 10 seconds on the actual proposals that this (group) is standing behind.

And if you want to take a look at Michael Bloomberg's actual record, you'd find a "bipartisan" that is really nothing more than a bland technocrat whose positions don't differ radically from any other mainstream candidate, though the...Brigade that's built up behind him is more "centrist" in the sense that they want to maintain the status quo and the power elite at all costs.

Because they're Serious! People! Bloomberg and his Solid Gold Unity08 dancers are claiming they're just rersponding to a national cry for salad forks and senatorial comity bipartisanship. But who are the ones really crying out?

Those who support the idea of his candidacy are either people who stand to see some of that $1 billion he'll be handing out if he runs; fools and naifs of the sort that supported Nader, albeit of the right-center rather than the far-left; people who hate Democrats and want to elect a Republican but cannot, either for personal or professional reasons, admit this. (See under "Broder, David.")

When political consultants and David Broders are your biggest fans, maybe you should just give it a rest, Mike.